Preface

Intel Edison Projects is meant for beginners who want to get to grips with the Intel Edison and explore its features. Intel Edison is an embedded computing platform, which allows us to explore areas of IoT, embedded systems, and robotics.

This book takes you through various concepts and each chapter has a project that can be performed by you. It covers multiple topics, including sensor data acquisition and pushing it to the cloud to control devices over the Internet, as well as topics ranging from image processing to both autonomous and manual robotics.

In every chapter, the book first covers some theoretical aspects of the topic, which include some small chunks of code and a minimal hardware setup. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the practical aspects of the project.

The projects discussed in this book wherever possible require only minimal hardware, and the projects in each chapter are included to make sure that you understand the basics.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Setting up Intel Edison, covers the initial steps of setting up the Intel Edison, flashing it, and setting up the environment for development.

Chapter 2, Weather Station (IoT), introduces you to IoT and uses a simple case of a weather station where we use temperature, smoke level, and sound level and push data to the cloud to visualize it.

Chapter 3, Intel Edison and IoT (Home Automation), covers a case for home automation, where we are controlling electrical load using the Intel Edison.

Chapter 4, Intel Edison and Security System, covers voice and image processing for the Intel Edison.

Chapter 5, Autonomous Robotics with Intel Edison, explores the field of robotics, where we develop a line-following robot using the Intel Edison and related algorithms.

Chapter 6, Manual Robotics with Intel Edison, explores UGVs and also guides you through the process of developing controller software.

What you need for this book

The mandatory prerequisites for this book are the Intel Edison with Windows/Linux/Mac OS. The software requirements are as follows:

• Arduino IDE
• Visual Studio
• FileZilla
• Notepad++
• PuTTY
• Intel XDK

Who this book is for

If you are a hobbyist, robot engineer, IoT enthusiast, programmer, or developer who wants to create autonomous projects with the Intel Edison, then this book is for you. Prior programming knowledge would be beneficial.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

int a = analogRead(tempPin ); float R = 1023.0/((float)a)-1.0;
R = 100000.0*R;

float temperature=1.0/(log(R/100000.0)/B+1/298.15)-273.15; Serial.print("temperature = "); Serial.println(temperature);
delay(500);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

string res = textBox.Text; if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(res))
  {
    MessageBox.Show("No text entered. Please enter again");
  }
else
  {
    textBlock.Text = res;

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

npm install mqtt

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "After you click on OK, the tool will automatically unzip the file."

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Questions

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